by Deirdre Bair
IN THE FALL OF 1945, THE commissions were piling up to the point of threatening to engulf him, but he still described himself as “fine, fat, I eat, and create artificial difficulties for myself,” no doubt referring to the undefined disasters that he feared might strike at any moment. His drawing table was a “mountain of scrap paper” that he had to dig through in order to make room to work. He had become intrigued by the idea of “baths, bathrooms, tubs, and basins” and was deeply involved in the world of “tiles, ornamental fretwork, women bathers with little portions of their bodies sticking out of the water.” He meant it all to be humorous, and whether it became beautiful or not was “incidental,” but these drawings were a big hit when he included them in his second book, The Art of Living, in 1949.
Once his position at The New Yorker was firmly cemented, much of his life during the years from 1945 to 1950 was centered on proliferating commercial work that ranged from the “highbrow to the low.” He signed on in 1945 to do an annual series of Christmas cards for the Museum of Modern Art, which he ended in 1952 for a more lucrative commission that lasted for a decade, creating a series of Christmas cards, calendars, and other seasonal novelties for Hallmark. He also did drawings for the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue, and in the process acquired a friend and major collector in Stanley Marcus. He did many dust jackets for books, among them the highly successful Chucklebait series for children by Margaret Scoggins. He created wallpaper and fabrics, some of which featured his representations of landmarks in Paris, Venice, Milan, and Rome. He created ads for companies that manufactured copper tubing and sheet metal, and the Noilly Pratt vermouth campaign (“Don’t Stir” without it.) His drawings were in magazines such as Life, Flair, Fortune, Harper’s, and Town & Country. Vogue sent him to Washington to do political drawings, and Harper’s Bazaar sent him to Paris to cover the fashion shows. He also produced drawings for architectural journals, which he drew for the money, keeping his thoughts to himself and not telling the editors that he thought the general tendency in postwar architecture and industrial design was “toward streamlined bad taste.” As for his overview of general-interest and fashion magazines, he thought them far more conservative than those in Europe, because of “advertising, which is the basis for every publication with a few exceptions.” In his view, there was no “real” art magazine in the United States, only “mouthpieces for art and antique dealers.” He added architecture magazines to this category, particularly Architectural Forum, because it was sold only by subscription and “lives on the advertising of construction companies, etc., which often control the content.” The only publication he deemed “perfectly free and more intelligent than its time” was The New Yorker.
In the dialogues with Aldo Buzzi that took place a good twenty-five years later, Steinberg spent quite a lot of time explaining what the magazine meant to him. Drawing for it made him feel that he was doing “a useful task” that allowed him to be “an active part of society.” What made him happiest was the vast number of readers who related to and appreciated his drawings, which gave him feelings of acceptance that he did not find anywhere else. Thinking about the early days of his career at The New Yorker brought back memories of his childhood and adolescence, when, like so many other youngsters with a creative bent, he was convinced that he was the only one beset by adults who did not understand him and who were constantly criticizing, scolding, and finding him lacking. He only felt “normal” when he retreated into the privacy of his art, and it was not until (in his exaggeration) “millions of people” responded to his cartoons and drawings that he became “an inventor of normality” who was able to exert a “social and political influence” that other adults willingly accepted.
For Steinberg, The New Yorker was an oasis: “[The editors] ask for a specific product and I give it to them. It’s a clear situation and therefore my relations with the magazine are logical, stable, without doubts; also due to the kindness (decency, loyalty, honesty, correctness) that has always reigned over the editorial environment, from Harold Ross to Bill Shawn to Jim Geraghty. They tell you yes or no at once, without hesitation, no possibility of misunderstandings, immediate payment, publication at the right moment, the author’s rights observed with meticulous care, complete protection of the artist: a marvelous kindness, which unfortunately is now vanishing everywhere.”
When Steinberg wrote this in the late 1970s, things were rapidly changing at the magazine, and he feared that “the Levantine system [bribery and corruption] has arrived in America, the homeland of trust.” He regretted the loss of what had been for him until then “an oasis, where America’s ancient morality survives intact.”
WHILE WORK FILLED HIS DAYS, STEINBERG was busy educating himself. He loved the movies, and after several hours at his worktable, when the pleasure of drawing threatened to become tedium, he took a walk and often ended up in a movie theater. His tastes were eclectic, ranging from The Lost Weekend to Open City, which he thought was proof that “the absence of Fascism is good for art.” He went to galleries and museums but complained about crowds that behaved as if they were in the funhouse at a fair. He thought Salvador Dalí and the crowds at his exhibition were well suited to each other, as he was “a clever pirate who cheats his buyers and they get what they deserve.” Always a voracious reader, he found Flaubert “better than ever” in Three Tales; Proust “sort of” bored him. He liked Tolstoy and often returned to War and Peace, as well as to Balzac, and was so fond of his New Yorker colleague Joseph Mitchell’s writing that he considered translating some of it into Italian. Most of all when he read, he was studying the history of the United States.
Steinberg was easily bored and often restless, and he needed excitement. He was so eager to see every part of his adopted country that he would go just about anywhere he was invited. One of his first excursions came in the spring of 1946, when he went to Pittsburgh to judge a nationwide contest for children’s painting at the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University). After wading through approximately six thousand drawings, he gave the prize to a little boy’s painting of “an old woman being decapitated.” In June, while spending the summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod (“a more violent place than the Italian Riviera”), he got word that Jim Geraghty had secured a press pass for him to cover the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.
These were the years when every glittering name in New York and Europe found its way into Saul Steinberg’s address book. In New York, he was a habitué at Del Pezzo, the midtown restaurant that was a hangout for artists, designers, writers, and architects, most of them an international mix of refugee “raffinati” like himself. On any given night he might share a table with Tino Nivola, Leo Lionni, Niccolò Tucci, Marcel Breuer, and Bernard Rudofsky. When Henri Cartier-Bresson was in New York, he too was a regular. Dorothy Norman and Jean Stein invited Steinberg to parties that included socialites, left-leaning intellectuals, and movie stars. Geoffrey Hellman and his wife Daphne gave soirees at their town house, where the hottest new writer or painter held court and Daphne often played her harp. Mary McCarthy, then married to Bowden Broadwater, introduced him to the crowd at Partisan Review; Steinberg shared her political views, and they formed a deep friendship based in later years on mutual activism. He enjoyed conversations with Joel Sayre and shared his love of postcards and exchanged them with Walker Evans; he learned a little bit about etching from Stanley William Hayter, with whom he exchanged examples of work; and he kept up his friendships with the Italian circle that included Nicola Chiaromonte, Carlo Levi, and Ugo Stille. When he and Hedda were not entertaining, he was out every night of the week, elegantly dressed in the clothing he now bought exclusively at Brooks Brothers.
HE AND HEDDA SAILED FOR ENGLAND on the Queen Mary in July 1946 and stayed there long enough to visit their various galleries and renew contact with friends before going on to France. In Paris they began a close friendship with Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s “Genet.” Through Henri Cartier-Bresson they met Giacometti, and Gjon Mili gave them
an introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Steinberg was entranced with the laconic and taciturn Giacometti after his first visit to his studio, where everything was a work of art, even the plaster-encrusted telephone. It was different with existentialism’s high priest and priestess, with whom there was no rapport.
Steinberg went to Sartre’s Rue Bonaparte apartment “because of my own snobbery,” to draw a small portrait. Sartre’s mother (with whom he lived) made him uncomfortable by watching over his shoulder as he drew. Later he drew Beauvoir, but her portrait was perfunctory and unsatisfying, as she was in a hurry for him to finish and there was no conversation between them. Neither she nor Sartre was interested in the portraits, and Steinberg never showed them his drawings. “Things never clicked for us with them,” Hedda recalled. Steinberg was furious with Sartre’s contention that “the Jews had survived only because of their persecution—for which therefore, they should thank God”; Sartre and Beauvoir dismissed Steinberg because of his hatred of communism and his embrace of all things American. When they saw each other in the Café Flore or the bar at the Pont Royal, they always nodded politely, but that was all. Several years later, when Hedda was in Paris without Saul, he scolded her for forcing Sartre to recognize and greet her in the Bar Pont Royal. He thought she should have snubbed Sartre, as she was far too good for the likes of him.
WHEN THEY LEFT PARIS, SAUL AND Hedda headed for Monte Carlo, because he wanted to gamble. They took a scenic route that had them rambling through Angers, Auxerre, Aix, Montpellier, Albi, and Toulouse. Saul won a little at the casino, which put him in a jolly mood as they continued on to Italy, where he saw Aldo in Milan for the first time since 1941. He was so determined to get Aldo to America that he launched a number of schemes, including trying to get press credentials from The New Yorker, which didn’t happen. He gave Aldo 50,000 lire to pay for a trip to Paris, where he wanted them to meet once his stint covering the Nuremberg trials was finished. He also promised to send more money to Aldo in regular increments.
Hedda returned to Paris to stay with her mother and brother while Saul went to Rome. He told her he was going to meetings with various friends who were interested in vague and amorphous film projects, which he mostly invented, but he didn’t tell her his real reason: Ada was living there and he wanted to see her. The meeting went badly, and although he did not tell her he was married, “she figured it out.” They resumed their affair, and he was relieved to find that he had no further doubts about having married Hedda instead of her. Nevertheless, when he left Ada he was “feeling guilty” for how he had treated her, which he tried to assuage by giving her 50,000 lire and promising to write and send money on a regular basis.
Steinberg with Sterne and Aldo Buzzi in New York, early 1950s. (illustration credit 12.1)
After he left Ada, he went to Udine, Vienna, and Munich and then on to Berlin to prepare himself to face Nuremberg. When he wrote to Aldo, he said he saw “Goring and company” but made no comment about the trials themselves. He was quartered with other American correspondents in the Faber Castle, home to the pencil-manufacturing family, sharing a room the size of a basketball court. Among them were John Stanton of Life and Victor Bernstein of PM, for whom he made his first “passport,” a fanciful false document akin to the larger diplomas, this one proclaiming Bernstein a “special ambassador to the War Crimes Trials.” Otherwise, everything he saw was “very depressing.” He tried to make a joke of it when he wrote to his parents: “I was in Nuremberg for the end of the trial and the executions (I didn’t assist in this),” but he was serious when he described to Aldo his sadness at what he saw throughout Germany. There was too much “pointless misery and destruction, especially in Berlin, where the ruins of bad architecture created ugly buildings and ugly ruins.” His drawings of the devastated landscape and the wretchedness of daily life appeared in the portfolio “Berlin” in The New Yorker on March 29 and April 12, 1947. By that time he and Hedda had finally managed to get out of Europe and back to New York, where they made some major changes in their working lives.
THEY HAD BEEN IN EUROPE FOR six months, which was almost three months longer than they had originally intended to stay, and Saul had “loafed” and done no work. They dallied because of the pleasure of unplanned side trips, such as an extended stay on the French Riviera, but the main delay was caused by both ship and airline strikes in France. They tried from Paris to confirm departures from England or Sweden, but everything was fully booked and they were unable to leave before cold weather set in. They had only taken summer clothes, so they had to ask friends in New York to send their winter clothing, because they could not sail until the end of November. The return voyage in early December was “calm and dignified,” but when compared to Paris, they thought “New York was dirty, disagreeable, and smelled bad.” Nevertheless, “little by little, one falls in love with it again.”
Steinberg had so many projects under way that he needed more space than the 50th Street apartment could provide, so he left it for Hedda to work in and rented a studio at 38 West 59th Street. Saul told Aldo it would solve the problem of where he would live when he came to New York, because he was determined to get him there. But even the studio space was not enough room for Steinberg’s many projects, so he also rented office space at 107 East 60th Street. He liked the daily walk to the studio but did not like the feeling of leaving home each morning to go to a job—he had had enough of that in the navy. One way he thought to make himself feel more at home was to install a bed and a carpet, which he soon did, more for Aldo’s future comfort than his own.
Once he had an office, his first order of business was to try to persuade Iris Barry, the founder of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, to curate a film festival, with which he would cooperate as another of his ongoing schemes to bring Aldo to New York. Aldo had never practiced architecture, and his career in the early postwar years consisted of working on whatever tasks his Lattuada brother-in-law found for him on the sets of his films. It was Aldo’s wife (as he always called Bianca) who held what Hedda called “the big job” as her brother’s most trusted associate, while Aldo was “more like a nineteenth-century gentleman—a bit of a dabbler in many things.” Steinberg loved the movies but was not interested in the intellectual idea of film, nor was he interested in the attention to administrative detail required to make an international documentary film festival happen, and the project soon languished.
He threw himself into socializing, and his date book grew fat with new names of people who became good friends, such as Monroe Wheeler, Russell Lynes, Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen, Leo Lerman, and Hattie Carnegie. He was a guest at the elegant Gramercy Park mansion owned by Benjamin Sonnenberg, where he met the ten-year-old Benjamin Jr. (a good friend as an adult) for the first time. Alexander “Sasha” Schneider, the violinist famed for his excellent cooking, was then living with the actress Geraldine Page, to whom Saul paid the kind of attention that made Hedda embarrassed and sad. Schneider loved to gather friends for glittering conversation over his gourmet food, and he invited Saul and Hedda to dine with Véra and Vladimir Nabokov. At their first meeting they discussed Nabokov’s study of Nikolai Gogol, which Steinberg had already reread several times. He continued to reread it frequently for the rest of his life, each time finding in it something new to pique his intellectual curiosity. It became one of his frequent references, almost a kind of symbolic shorthand for ideas of his own that he wanted to convey, particularly in the drawings that featured an enormous nose. Similarly, Nabokov’s favorite artist was the “wonderful Saul Steinberg,” who “could raise unexpected questions about the consequence of a style or even a single line, or could open up a metaphysical riddle with as much wit as an Escher or a Magritte and with far more economy.” With Nabokov, Steinberg formed another of his lasting intellectual friendships, which were almost always with writers, Saul Bellow and William Gaddis primary among them. Other writers played important roles in Steinberg’s intellectual development, but it
was Nabokov who was responsible for a major impact on his life: a few years after they met, Nabokov told him how to break his daily habit of smoking three or more packs of Salem cigarettes “cold turkey.” It took two attempts, but Steinberg followed Nabokov’s instructions and never smoked again.
THERE WAS ANOTHER MAJOR TRIP IN the spring, this time to Mexico City for the month of April. Hedda was already there, studying and working with Miguel Covarrubias, and Saul and Henri and Monique Cartier-Bresson joined her. They and Hedda stayed on after Saul returned to New York to finish up a mural commission for the Bonwit Teller department store. Afterward, on May 20, Saul left for Cincinnati, where he had a commission to create murals for a new restaurant, the Skyline at the Terrace Plaza Hotel. The latter mural interested him most but not for the actual work: he had been as far as Pittsburgh, and now he had the opportunity to see Cincinnati and to cross the Ohio River into Kentucky as a side trip.
He made the Bonwit Teller mural quickly but was not pleased with it. The one for the Skyline restaurant, which was “much bigger and more serious,” was going to require a lot more thought before he could even begin to do the considerable work required. He made a preliminary visit to the site in May, driving along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in his big Packard convertible, thought about the mural over the summer while he and Hedda were in Vermont with the Nivolas, and then worked on it from October until the end of the year. His friend Gjon Mili offered his photography studio on the Lower East Side because Steinberg needed more space than his own small room to execute a mural whose dimensions were too large for it. He planned to make it in sections using oil on canvas, and, in yet another of his schemes to bring Aldo to New York, offered him the job of “assistant, with excellent pay.” Aldo declined, so Steinberg worked alone.